Get the beef and get it faster (rev3)

One reason I remain only mildly impressed by the President's attention-grabbing note that we are "addicted to oil" is that his proposal doesn't really ask people to work that hard. Reduce oil imports...(good)...from the Middle East...(okay, that's still most less than half (thanks, Slummy!) of them)...by 75%...(I'd like to go for energy independence, but 75% ain't bad)...by 2025...(all these caveats and it takes 19 years?).

No, the economy doesn't turn on a dime and neither does the way we use oil. But 19 years? Even a private company (GE) has committed to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 40% in six years. Why can't we move quickly?

Let's think about this. 2/3 of our oil goes to the transportation sector. We already have the technology to have cars run on 80% biofuel (such as ethanol), to be gas/electric hybrids, and to plug in to the wall to give us the first 20 miles from electricity each day. Thomas Friedman has noted that this could push fuel efficiency over 500 mpg. If we review the "Nerdy Math" section from my original post on this, we could achieve complete oil independence in two years for the lowly sum of $170 billion. That's about 6.6% of the total federal budget, but it gets the job done in 1/10th the time. What are we waiting for?



P.S. How to get $170 billion? We use 9,063,000 barrels of gasoline per day, that's 139 billion gallons a year. If we increase the federal gas tax by $1.22 $0.61 a gallon, we pay for energy independence in two years (sorry about that. The initial figure would have financed the change in one year). It costs, but it's better than sending that money to the mullahs.